SUDAN last night thwarted a Western drive to get the African Union to agree a timetable for United Nations peacekeepers to take over in Darfur, where the United States says “genocide” is taking place.

Resisting intense lobbying by Western powers, the 53-nation African Union extended its own beleaguered mission in the Sudanese province for six months rather than handing over to UN troops.

The decision came as a blow to the Western governments who see the early dispatch of a UN force as the best chance of saving thousands of lives. Western diplomats had wanted the AU to use a key meeting in Addis Ababa to agree a firm timetable for a handover to the UN in Darfur.

The AU’s Peace and Security Council said it remained committed “in principle” to an eventual handover to the UN. But it shied away from setting a firm date.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, sought to put a positive spin on the AU meeting. “From what we know now, they have at least agreed to work on a six-month extension and to work with the United Nations on the transition,” Mr Annan told reporters at UN headquarters. “That is the decision that has been taken.”

UN officials said they were “confident” that a UN team, which had already postponed its visit to Sudan last week, would now get visas to travel to the country to plan for an eventual UN peacekeeping presence. The UN would use the African Union’s six-month extension to ready its own peacekeeping mission, they said.

The AU force of 7,000 poorly equipped troops has been monitoring a shaky ceasefire in the three-year conflict that has cost at least 180,000 lives and made two million homeless.

The violence has worsened in recent months to the point where huge swaths of western Sudan are now too dangerous for aid workers. The fighting has also spread over the border in neighbouring Chad.

The UN refugee agency announced this week that it was cutting this year’s budget for Darfur by almost half because security concerns had severely restricted its work there.

The US has described the campaign of rape, pillage and murder by marauding Arab militiamen, known as Janjawid, against black villagers in Darfur as genocide.

Together with the EU, it had pushed hard to overcome Sudanese objections to the UN force. President Bush called last month for a UN force twice the size of the AU presence with “Nato stewardship”.

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